Tag: Marine Corps

Since before the Republican-led committee voted (along partisan lines) to seek the memo’s declassification and publication, the FBI has been complaining that it was not permitted to review the memo. As I explained last week, this was a very unpersuasive complaint. Having stonewalled the committee’s information requests for several months, the Bureau and Justice Department are hardly well positioned to complain about being denied access; the committee, by contrast, has every reason to believe they would have slow-walked any review in order to delay matters further.

All that aside, the FBI was guaranteed access to the memo before its publication because of the rules of the process. Once the committee voted to disclose, that gave the president five days to object. During that five days, Trump’s own appointees at the FBI and DOJ would have the chance to pore over the memo and make their objections and policy arguments to their principal, the president, and to the rest of the Trump national-security team. This tells us the real objection was not that they were barred from reviewing the memo; it is that they were barred from reviewing it on a schedule that would make it more difficult to derail publication.

The FBI’s top leadership — whose careers, business dealings, politics, marriages and extramarital affairs intertwine — invested itself incompetently and illegally into the 2016 election campaign against Donald Trump. In part to cover itself, it launched the so-called “Russia probe.” Its members are personally, deeply interested in keeping the public from seeing the documents concerning these activities. They raised the familiar shield: release would compromise the sources and methods of national security.

The House of Representatives’ Republican majority wanted the documents made public, issued a subpoena for them, and was prepared to jail senior FBI for contempt had they not complied with it. The House compromised, being satisfied by viewing them and making a summary, which it has voted to make public. The FBI and the Justice Department’s bureaucracy, being out of options for saving their reputations, their pensions, and perhaps for keeping themselves out of jail, urge President Trump to advise the House to guard the secrecy of the summary, of the activities that it describes, and hence to save their bacon.

In his plea, Posey admitted he and another staffer — Thomas Dodd, who has also pleaded guilty — illegally funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars from charitable foundations and the people in charge of the foundations to finance Stockman’s campaigns and pay for personal expenses.

A Texas Tech freshman shot and killed a police officer after he was busted for having drugs and drug paraphernalia in his dorm room. The student, Hollis Daniels, was being questioned by the officer when he somehow obtained a gun (it’s not clear how) and shot the officer in the head. Daniels has been charged with capital murder.

What is interesting – and disheartening – for pro-lifers is that Illinois is the first state where taxpayer funding of abortion came about through the democratic process. The Hyde Amendment places strict limits on the ability of the federal government to fund abortion through Medicaid. However, states have always been free to pursue their own policy. Prior to today, 15 states funded abortion through Medicaid. In eleven of these states, the policy was imposed through a judicial ruling. In the four other states, health departments simply decided Medicaid would cover elective abortions. As such, Governor Rauner made history in an ignominious way.

Regrettably, outside of yourself, the individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will “Make America Great Again,” have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months. This was made patently obvious as I read the text of your speech on Afghanistan this week…

The fact that those who drafted and approved the speech removed any mention of Radical Islam or radical Islamic terrorism proves that a crucial element of your presidential campaign has been lost…

Just as worrying, when discussing our future actions in the region, the speech listed operational objectives without ever defining the strategic victory conditions we are fighting for. This omission should seriously disturb any national security professional, and any American who is unsatisfied with the last 16 years of disastrous policy decisions which have led to thousands of Americans killed and trillions of taxpayer dollars spent in ways that have not brought security or victory.

Most existing Venezuelan debt traded in the U.S. was issued by PDVSA. The sanctions don’t prohibit the resale of those bonds, only purchases and trades of new PDVSA debt.

But trades of existing bonds issued by the Venezuelan government — which are different from PDVSA bonds — will be barred, a move intended to harm and sow discontent among Maduro’s inner circle. That debt is held by high-level Venezuelan government leaders, who will now be forced to turn to other so-called secondary markets in, say, China or Russia, though senior Trump administration officials said they hope Friday’s sanctions will make those countries think twice before purchasing the debt.

In recent months, the city has adopted higher minimum wages, mandatory paid leave and “fair” scheduling requirements, forced unionization of rideshare drivers, “democracy vouchers” (taxpayer-funded campaign contributions), and a soda tax. Sure, these policies have destroyed job opportunities and autonomy for lower-income earners and entrants into the labor market, strained, stagnated, and alienated small businesses, undermined federal labor law, violated the First Amendment, and increased the cost of delicious, sugary beverages. Nonetheless, Sawant and Company have earned major #Resistance bona fides. They are so woke.

The council is determined to offset the negative effects of “regressive taxes” and fight income inequality, so they’ve enacted a tax, not to meet any specific fiscal need, but to, admittedly, redistribute wealth. Predictably, they are messaging this as a civil rights issue on par with abortion legalization and the redefinition of marriage. The primary problem is, the tax is illegal.

Not many people, including many Asians themselves, knew how hard they had to work until Princeton University published a study, titled “Admission Preferences for Minority Students, Athletes, and Legacies at Elite Universities.” The study uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. The study shows African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, and Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points. But if you are Asians, 50 points were deducted. So for an Asian kid to have a shot at an elite college, his/her SAT scores has to be several hundred points higher to make up for the penalty of being Asian. Obviously, Asian kids are punished for their successes.

Regardless of how it came to be, the Seventeenth Amendment savages the balance of power inherent in the constitutional structure. The Constitution created a system of checks and balances not only at the federal level, but between federal, state, and local governments. This system is fundamentally based on balancing self-interest.

States are interested in exclusively maintaining as much power over health, safety, and welfare policy as possible. They naturally desire to prevent federal intrusion into these areas, and would work to shield their citizens from federal overreach. However, the Seventeenth Amendment deprives them of the ability to do so.

On the advice of his lawyer, Hall began to contact local hospitals in an attempt to get them to certify that he had not been treated for any mental health conditions. At one hospital, Hall told the paper that a clerk “turned white as a ghost” when she read him a file with a matching name but slightly different Social Security number. Hall said that matched a mistake he noticed with the Social Security number listed on the confiscation order police showed him.

But the Kurdish community in Iraq, represented by the Kurdish Regional Government, has a real shot at statehood. The KRG is a quasi-sovereign entity overseeing an efficient military and an independent economy. Although it is plagued by corruption and cronyism, like every other political organisation in the region, the KRG represents the only truly functional government in Iraq, presiding over the country’s most peaceful and stable areas.

The strength of the KRG’s position is not lost on its leaders. The ruling Kurdish Democratic Party plans to hold a referendum on independence this September. Yet even a resounding call for secession will not be enough to achieve success. For that, the US must throw its weight behind the pro-Western KRG and offer resolute support for the independence effort.

There is virulent debate about what approach is best. So-called process writing, like the lesson Lyse experienced in Long Island, emphasizes activities like brainstorming, freewriting, journaling about one’s personal experiences and peer-to-peer revision. Adherents worry that focusing too much on grammar or citing sources will stifle the writerly voice and prevent children from falling in love with writing as an activity.

That ideology goes back to the 1930s, when progressive educators began to shift the writing curriculum away from penmanship and spelling and toward diary entries and personal letters as a psychologically liberating activity. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, this movement took on the language of civil rights, with teachers striving to empower nonwhite and poor children by encouraging them to narrate their own lived experiences.

Dr. Hochman’s strategy is radically different: a return to the basics of sentence construction, from combining fragments to fixing punctuation errors to learning how to deploy the powerful conjunctive adverbs that are common in academic writing but uncommon in speech, words like “therefore” and “nevertheless.” After all, the Snapchat generation may produce more writing than any group of teenagers before it, writing copious text messages and social media posts, but when it comes to the formal writing expected at school and work, they struggle with the mechanics of simple sentences.